A few weeks ago I spoke with professors John Inazu and Mark Valeri to discuss some aspects of the 2020 election. Both professors brought up topics unrelated to the election, like religion in academia, that I found fascinating. The following Q&A is a combination of our first and second talks, shortened and edited for clarity.

SL: Do you think that there are concrete actions that the University administration or faculty could take to educate students about how to engage with people who hold different views or do you think it has to all come naturally?

JI: My friend, Eboo Patel, who co-taught a seminar with me at Wash. U. a few years ago, runs an organization called the Interfaith Youth Core in Chicago. The purpose of his organization is to advocate for more attention to religious diversity on college and university campuses. And the point he often makes is that higher ed institutions are really good about showing their students the importance of diversity across a whole range of different metrics but they do almost nothing when it comes to religious diversity and understanding religious diversity. And when you get out into the world after college, it turns out that religious differences drive a huge proportion of local, domestic, and international conflict. If you don’t leave college without some sense of what religious diversity is, why it matters, and how you navigate those differences, then in some sense, college has failed to educate you in the right ways. I’m glad to see that Wash. U. has recently undertaken efforts toward engaging with religious pluralism through a new Office of Religious, Spiritual, and Ethical Life, led by Rev. Callista Isabelle.

MV: I’m going to add one thing to that, which gets to the core of my work. That is helping students to detach themselves from contemporary politics and be humanistic scholars who study and read wonderful texts about deep human issues: What is meaning? What is justice? What is politics for? What is human nature? Those big issues give us a perspective that allows us to enter into the political with a sense of perspective and tolerance for each other. I think the humanities needs to be supported and by that I don’t mean the humanities focused on contemporary issues. I think issues of race, and issues for St Louis, contemporary political concerns, are really important. I’m not minimizing them. I’m saying that they can be better addressed if we detach ourselves and not always recur to them, but return to decontextualized issues, humanistic questions. One of my most influential undergraduate teachers said, “I’ve got to teach you to relish irrelevance for a while, and to let your minds go and read these things, and engage them without ever wanting to be relevant for a while. Then when you come back into the scene of relevance, you’re in a much better place.”

SL: Professor Inazu, you mentioned that there’s a sense in certain parts of academia that someone can’t possibly be a devout Christian while simultaneously being very intelligent. Where do you think that idea stems from? And how do you think that belief could be counterproductive or negative to the way that academia and society as a whole function?

JI: There’s a dimension of the academy that is largely unaware of or under-informed about the nuances of religious faith for a lot of people, and they’re left largely with caricatures or oversimplifications about who religious people are or what they believe. And there are pockets of the academy that have few inhibitions about saying things about Christians and other religious people that they would never say about any other people group or demographic. It’s a striking outlier to a more general sense of tolerance and appreciation of diversity.

MV: The reason for that partly falls on an old style of religion in the academy from the 1940s and 50s, which assumed that the role of religion in the academy was in some sense to foster piety among the students. We as universities still try to shape students’ souls and hearts and behaviors, but not in the ways that it was done in the chapel services at Princeton back in 1950. So I think it’s a holdover from a previous era and does not take into account the intellectual expansiveness of religion.

JI: There’s a bit of a tension in some academic circles between religious identity and other forms of identity. So when you think of professors, for example, nobody would say you can’t be a woman and also a very good professor who engages thoroughly and carefully with texts around gender. And nobody would say you can’t be a person of color and a great teacher, or a Democrat or a Republican and also a star student. We in the University are very good about welcoming the fullness of identity characteristics when it comes to teachers and students, but for some reason, we get wary when it comes to religious identity. People can be fully religious and also really good teachers and scholars. The University’s norms should focus on whether individual teachers and individual students are able to balance their own identities with their professional responsibilities in a way that makes sense to the relevant community. And it seems to me that that should be the same regardless of which identity characteristic we’re describing.

SL: Professor Valeri, last time we talked, you talked about the need to detach ourselves from contemporary politics so that we can enter politics with more perspective and tolerance. I was wondering whether you think the same goes for religion. Should we try to detach ourselves from our individual experiences with religion and instead look at religion through more of a historical and more holistic idea?

MV: My assumption is everyone comes to this with a religious conviction. The belief that there’s nothing but molecules out there is in a sense a religious claim – a claim about ultimate meaning and the non-existence of God. Entertaining ideas about meaning and transcendence is always refreshing, always intellectually stimulating, always enlarging of our minds and our hearts. It’s always a good thing to do that. Judging religions as good or bad because they have this or that social impact strikes me as jumping too fast too quickly towards the end game, and not playing out the internal dynamics of a religious tradition first.

JI: One of the problems that I see increasingly at a place like Wash. U. is people wanting to pretend that differences don’t actually exist or don’t actually matter. So in our coming together, it’s more about papering over those differences and pretending that we can talk about ideas and concepts at the lowest common denominator when in fact, we have a lot of differences that really matter. To me, the goal in coming together is to find common ground, even as we disagree about the common good.

SL: The religious world is so incredibly vast that I’m sure many students can feel potentially overwhelmed by delving into the history or ideology of different religions. Do you have advice for what these students should try to think through when they’re grappling with these ideas?

JI: I would encourage a posture of humility and inquiry; the same with which you would bring to learning about anything else in life.